


Deliver Me From Nowhere

by jackmarlowe



Series: Somebody's Sins [2]
Category: The Godfather (1972 1974 1990)
Genre: 1930s, Adopted Sibling Relationship, Gen, Period-Typical Homophobia, Surgery, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-19
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 11:42:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12131727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackmarlowe/pseuds/jackmarlowe
Summary: Michael, with his aimless reaching, with his whisper of a five o’clock shadow and his gaunt hollow face that looks more Sicilian — it is only men that strike Tom as Sicilian, not in the sense of where they come from but what he’s been taught a man should embody — with every counted week of artificial change, is so swallowed up by the hospital bed it makes him a stranger.Set in 1939.





	Deliver Me From Nowhere

**Author's Note:**

> This story, which is an ambling rewrite where Michael is trans, has been going over a year now – I reworked a little something I wrote a while ago to get myself back on track and say thank you to everyone who's been so awesome about this idea. You should see my longer instalment The Obvious Child for a cleverer disclaimer about the story and my take on historical transness in the context of this time and family, but basically know that the first bit of this wee two-parter involves what'll probably be my most explicit references to Michael's medical transition as was possible in the late 1930s. My intention is to be respectful, non-gratuitous, and counter to bad trans narrative tropes as much as possible with this story; as always, I'm keen for feedback from LGBTQ folks about that.

Michael, with his aimless reaching, with his whisper of a five o’clock shadow and his gaunt hollow face that looks more Sicilian — it is only men that strike Tom as Sicilian, not in the sense of where they come from but what he’s been taught a man should embody — with every counted week of artificial change, is so swallowed up by the hospital bed it makes him a stranger. He is an anonymous boy (not yet Sicilian, Tom notes himself thinking; not yet a man) with a narrow chest that rises and falls flat beneath a starch white gown of which he is the twentieth occupant. He is not yet his brother, but there is no mistaking, in the parts of his face that have not and will not change, the marks of their family. Tom will never have the slim curve of his nose or the crooked angle of his eyebrows overlaying eyelids bruised olive with sleeplessness and hospital food. It strikes him for the first time that perhaps Michael, with his condition, sees these little details with the strange obsessiveness Tom thought peculiar to every breathing moment of his own adolescence.

The redheaded nurse glances through the glass window and goes away when Tom lifts his eyes to hers. The advantages of a private room.

He’s not sure how Michael paid for it. This is a second, more embarrassing reason for his visit: as he’s come to understand it, most of the women come to this surgery through back channels, and for all his going his own ostensibly innocent way Michael’s life-built notion of what is illegal stretches so far beyond the little world of the abortionist. Tom, in his unofficial and mostly self-appointed capacity as the half-trained legal voice of reason within the family, understands it is not out of the realm of possibility Michael’s followed another family name he knows from the city to this uncertain and painful conclusion. Painful; he lifts his hands and weight from the bed as Michael stirs, a touch of discomfort tugging at the cracked corner of his mouth as his eyes shift beneath their clammy lids and open slightly.

They watch each other for a long minute and don’t speak.

Michael’s fingers finally twitch against the tubes running up the blanket to his wrists, and he glances down to look at nothing; Tom sees his tongue set firm against the inside of his lip and push there when his dark eyes narrow and go too liquid. He allows a hand back onto the bed and leaves it close to Michael’s, just enough. A Sicilian wouldn’t hesitate to take his hand but American men pause here: he wants to give Michael the choice.

‘Does Pop know?’

‘No.’

He clears his throat as if to scrape out his own ragged hoarse voice. Tom glances at the bedside water jug; Michael follows his look a little slower than he would, his eyes wandering to the corners of the room where streetlamp amber filters hazy through the curtains and coming back to focus on Tom in his black and white family suit. He shakes his head and frowns. There’s a sweat-spike of black hair in his line of vision and it takes Tom his own slow moment to realise it and push it back for him.

‘How you feeling?’ he asks, as gently and casually as he can. Michael raises a hand in the same halfway motion he had when he slept and comes up short from the tubes – Tom grips it and sets it down for him. ‘Take it easy, champ.’

‘You call little kids _champ_ ,’ Michael hisses. It’s not quite an accusation but his eyes glitter overbright with the effort of finding it between his teeth.

‘Yeah, well. You’re still a kid.’

He raises his hands again, this time more deliberately so he doesn’t jar the machines by his bed. Tom can see precisely how much energy it takes him in how he grits his teeth before laying sweaty palms delicate and precise on his own collarbones, just above the dressings the nurse tugged away the sheet to show Tom half an hour before. ‘I did this,’ he whispers, and turns his chin to give Tom a flat look. A little smile flutters slow and fades, though his expression does not; those particular muscles are simply extra effort. ‘A kid with — medical autonomy and life insurance. They got a form. For both.’

Tom pauses. Something like a joke comes from the drugs he’s on but feels uncharacteristic in his hoarse voice with his strange jutting jaw, like Sonny’s but too gentle to be their brother's, unlike Connie’s and too gentle too to be hers, though she and Michael had once looked most alike with their dark narrow quiet and crooked mistaken-for-twins smiles.

Michael grimaces as he lets his hands slip awkward down his sides, avoiding the surface of his white-clad chest. ‘Are you mad at me?’

‘’Course not, Mikey.’

‘You understand.’

‘Not really,’ Tom admits, and leans back at a safe enough distance to cross his legs. ‘But I wasn’t gonna let you wind up in some strange hospital we don’t even use by yourself. Especially on a Saturday night. I told you I wasn’t gonna be like Mama about – things.’

Michael blinks slow, his eyes narrowing again into a mull-over that could nearly be mocking. ‘You think you got it,’ he murmurs. ‘ _Fag to fag._ You always - you do this. I'm not-'

It is either the small involuntary sound he makes or the twitch in his suspended ankle, helpless, that brings Michael out of his painkillers somewhat and forces his head up to look and sincerely amend: ‘Man to man, okay.'

The phrase comes out as vulnerable and soft as the insides of Tom’s gut. He nods.

‘Sorry, Tommy.’

‘I’m not gonna tell Pop.’

Michael lets a breath through his clenched teeth. ‘He’ll know. End of the week.’

‘I mean about the life insurance. We already got policies on each of us, you know. Costs money.’

‘He’s not gonna recognise me.’ Michael jerks his head back from the pillow again, ducking sleep with a sudden familiar irritation. ‘You think?’

‘He will.’

‘No. You think – he’s gonna-’

Tom reaches and lets his thumb brush over the back of Michael’s hand. He’s warm but the sweat has passed like a phantom fever; sleep has come and gone in his pulse, which is right where it should be. His head falls slow back against the pillow and he holds their hands easy between them, mouth half-open with the sentence passing away as he watches Tom. His brother, Tom tries privately some levels into his imagination, and cannot find him yet between Sonny and Fredo, whose angles clash and leave no obvious room in the picture for the boy lying in front of him. A man, small for nineteen but more so in this small white bed and thin white blankets than he will be standing up straight, sitting in a classroom, at their dinner table. Michael licks his lips.

‘I won’t tell. Either.’

‘I know. I’ve known that.’

'He won't care.'

'I know,' Tom says quiet, and smiles so Michael returns the smile with the trusting reflex of the drugged. 

He hasn't been so sentimental since he was about fifteen, Tom considers idly, smoking at the window when Michael is asleep with his hands curled awkward on his belly, about what the family will think of either of them. The dark parking lot is filled with the sound of the clock at the other end of the ward and in the blackness Tom imagines the harbinger shape of Peter Clemenza slipping doggish and heavy-eyed between the cars

A truck murmurs off the highway and makes a low buzz at the window that stops when he rests a fingertip against the fogged-up glass. Tom considers: he briefly extends this small hypothetical vision, not for the first time, to how he'd make himself sound like a consigliere to the Don coming for his youngest child, and remembers he does not yet know what Michael's done.


End file.
